Clod Ensemble: How it Moves
30 Years of Performance-Making
An exhibition at Clod Ensemble Studios
Friday 12 September – Saturday 20 September (see timings below)
Greenwich Peninsula, SE10 0BQ
For three decades, Clod Ensemble’s genre-defying work has pushed the boundaries between dance, theatre, music and installation.
Clod Ensemble: How it Moves traces the full breadth of Clod Ensemble’s body of work, from their ongoing fascination in the relationship between music and movement, to productions that explore the encounter between performance and medicine, to the recurring question of how human beings relate to the spaces they occupy.
The exhibition presents images, films, rehearsal notes, drawings, oral histories, sound recordings, scores and ephemera, revealing the many textures of three decades of performance-making.
Clod Ensemble was founded in London in 1995 by director/choreographer Suzy Willson and composer Paul Clark. Drawing on influences from dance, music, theatre and visual arts, together they have developed a highly original performance language, forged in collaboration with dancers, actors, musicians, medics, architects and orchestras.
Performances are created through guided improvisation with performers, where movement material develops, shifts and is ‘transposed’ between different bodies. This constant shift of perspective allows themes and motifs to develop and resonate in unexpected ways.
The question ‘how does it move?’ is at the core of the company’s creative process.
‘There is no single discipline or person with privileged access to interpreting how things move; dancers might be hypermobile and expressive, but we have found that everyone we work with can learn something new about the world and themselves by asking this question.
For me, the joy of art-making in between genres or in the midst of them, is the potential for the creation of new forms. The pleasure is in collaboration and dialogue, of diversity of experience and knowledge, the network and flow of people, information and geographies.’
Suzy Willson
Clod Ensemble: Under Glass. Image credit Manuel Vason. Clod Ensemble has created work for some of the world’s most iconic venues – from Sadler’s Wells and Tate Modern, Manchester’s The Lowry, the Welsh Millennium Centre, Serralves Museum Porto and New York City’s Public Theater. From shows in which the performers are within glass containers (Under Glass) to those which use entire cityscapes as their stage (Red Ladies), Clod Ensemble’s work celebrates movement, music and visual languages as vital ways of knowing, learning and communicating.
Exhibition Opening Times
The exhibition will be open for public viewing from Friday 12 – Sunday 14th September, and again from Wednesday 17 – Friday 19th Sept. See the opening times below:
Fri 12 September: 1830 – 2130. Exhibition Preview Event (Book via Eventbrite)
Sat 13 September: 1100 – 1500. Talks & Tours (Free to attend, Book via Open House)
Sun 14 September: 1100 – 1500 (Free to attend, Book via Open House)
Wed 17 September: 1300 – 1700 (Open to public, no booking required)
Thur 18 September: 1200 – 1600 (Open to public, no booking required)
Friday 19 September: 1300 – 1700 (Open to public, no booking required)
Clod Ensemble Studios, designed by Mole Architects. Photo by Nick Guttridge. Suzy Willson and Lotte Allan
Klaud Architects
Michael Smith
Accompanying Events
Header image – Clod Ensemble: Musical Scenes. Image credit Richard Nicholson.
